Movies

The movie event of the year is two movies, actually: One about the world of one of our most cherished childhood dolls and the other about the development of the atomic bomb.

Paramount Pictures' "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One" opened at the top of the domestic box office this weekend, amassing $56.2 million during the regular three-day window, according to studio estimates.

If it weren’t for a faded photo that happened to fall into the hands of Jeremiah Chechik, “Benny & Joon” would have never been shot in Spokane. The quirky romantic comedy-drama, which starred Johnny Depp and Mary Stuart Masterson, was slated to be filmed in Los Angeles. But Chechik decided to direct the film in a much smaller town.

I tried to read the newspaper the first time I experienced “Die Hard” while lounging on the couch with HBO on in the background. Even though it was the sports section, it was impossible to focus on baseball stats when the courageous John McClane was risking his life racing through a corporate tower to save hundreds of innocents, including his estranged wife.

As Hollywood actors get ready to join the Writers Guild of America on picket lines, Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Bob Iger had some harsh words Thursday about the walkouts set to further paralyze the entertainment industry. Hours before SAG-AFTRA's national board was set to vote on a strike, Iger told CNBC's David Faber that the guilds are being "unrealistic" in their demands. He said their ...

When Hollywood came calling, Kim Stout answered quickly.

Thirty years ago, “Benny & Joon” — a romantic comedy starring Mary Stuart Masterson, Aidan Quinn, Julianne Moore and featuring, in his first major leading role, a 30-year-old Johnny Depp — was playing in theaters nationwide.

"Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part One" (everyone take a breath) is as busy and overstuffed as its title. After introducing the TV-based franchise in 1996, star and producer Tom Cruise has steadily upped the ante on spectacle and action; his stunts, which he famously insists on doing himself, have become part of worldwide marketing campaigns that wisely dispense with fiddly details like plot and dialogue and rely solely on the visual language of Cruise's body in space, doing amazing things.

When a group of Irish ladies from 1967 Dublin make a pilgrimage to Lourdes seeking a cure for a little boy who is mysteriously mute in a movie called "The Miracle Club" - three of them dragging emotional baggage about unforgiven slights and betrayals from decades earlier - you can be fairly certain that some form of divine intercession will occur before the closing credits. Mind you, it's not necessarily the sort you read about in the annals of unexplained medical wonders, where crutches are thrown to the ground and the lame are seen to walk. Rather, it is the kind all too common in movies of this ilk, thanks to a predictable screenplay courtesy of Joshua D. Maurer, Timothy Prager and Jimmy Smallhorne.

'Indiana Jones': one last adventurous ride

See not one but two Studio Ghibli animes

It's officially a Flash fact: DC Studios' Scarlet Speedster bombed at the box office.

“Crazy Rich Asians” screenwriter Adele Lim swings for the fences with her directorial debut, “Joy Ride,” and knocks it out of the park with this rowdy, raucous comedy about a search for identity and finding yourself in friendship. Hilariously daring, deeply moving, and stereotype-busting in equal measure, “Joy Ride” is also the raunchiest movie to most likely to make you shed a tear.

There are so many different and varied flavors of the apocalypse film: the bombast and spectacle of a disaster movie à la Roland Emmerich, or the punky desert chic of a “Mad Max” movie. But there’s also the lo-fi take, the kind of stripped-down indie films in which a couple of isolated people experience the apocalypse from afar, with themes of life, death and survival that resonate in a more existential, philosophical register, rather than the action-packed flicks that imagine the end of the world as something more immediate and violent.

A true tale? That's an 'Insidious' deception

The fifth "Indiana Jones" film might have trouble fulfilling its box-office destiny. Disney's "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" opened in first place at the domestic box office this weekend, collecting a lackluster $60 million, according to estimates from measurement firm Comscore. 

'Past Lives': Some memories never let us go

Alicia Roth Weigel, Sean Saifa Wall and River Gallo are credited as the "cast" of the worthy documentary "Every Body," rather than its subjects - possibly because we get to know these three activists, more than a little bit, over the course of the film. They are introduced on-screen with names, ages and, as is not uncommon these days, pronouns. And then, in introductory interviews by director Julie Cohen (one-half of the team behind the camera for the Oscar-nominated 2018 Ruth Bader Ginsburg doc "RBG"), we learn why they're in a movie about the lives and experiences of intersex people: folks who sometimes possess ambiguous external genitalia, or physical traits of one gender that do not correspond to their sexual DNA. (Typically, XX sex chromosomes determine the female gender, and XY for men, although variations do occur.)

Father Time casts his long shadow over “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” and not just because the 42-year-old action-adventure franchise, now in its fifth installment, was already old-fashioned – a throwback to “Buck Rogers” and other serials of the 1930s – when “Raiders of the Lost Ark” debuted in 1981. Nor is that ticking of the clock that you hear merely echoed in the sound of news reports that this film will be the last outing for Harrison Ford (81 years old next month) in the title role, or that “Dial” marks the last film for composer John Williams, 91, whose instantly recognizable theme music can be heard through the new film. Franchise director Steven Spielberg, 76, has also finally ceded the reins to James Mangold (“Ford v Ferrari”), who makes a capable contribution to the canon here.